When you walk into my classroom, I'm going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that's the only way to prepare you for the real world.
I have spent the greater part of my life in a hotel room with seven or eight kids, looking after everyone, sorting out fights, wiping noses, handing out towels, not having a clean towel left for me.
When I came to Mumbai to act and it didn't work out for me for few years, I thought I will go back to training but casting room has been a great training space for me.
I have a really great family, and when I'm not filming, I go home and walk the dogs, take out the garbage, clean my room, all that stuff. My family and my friends keep me in line, and make sure I don't get crazy.
I always felt a bit of a nerd, but my family gets me and my oddities. My kids and partner are way cooler than I am, but they let me in the room with them.
The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.
I always deeply admire people who can stay still in a room and wait for people to come to them.
I'm drawn to scenes in movies where you just see characters turning off lights in a room or putting the groceries away; it's like, 'I understand that.' We all have to get ready for bed, and we all do it in a different way, and yet it's all strangely familiar and strangely human.
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
